Chemistry's web of data expands

摘要

Other areas of science feast on free online data, but chemistry has been late to the party. Now it is catching up. In the latest effort to provide free access to chemical information, the London-based company SureChem (owned by Digital Science, a sister company to Nature Publishing Group) said this week that it would release data on 10 million molecules patented by the pharmaceutical industry since 1976. Harvested automatically from some 20 million patents, the data could lower barriers to drug discovery by academic researchers.